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.ICU Domain Extension: Do You See Me?

.ICU, the generic domain extension (gTLD), was approved by ICANN in ICANN’s New gTLD Program. ShortDot SA, based in Luxembourg is the registry of the .ICU. The extension stands for “I See You”.

The Story of .ICU

ICANN opened the new gTLD program in 2012. .icu was applied for this program and was delegated. Registry of .icu, Shortdot SA, was founded by Lars Jensen, Kevin Kopas, Michael Riedl, and Christian Tecar.

The sunrise period started on 24 April 2018 and general availability started on 29 May 2018. Since then, anyone can register a .icu domain.

We show the most popular websites and most expensive domain sales for each extension on our domain extension analyses. There is no significant domain sales and popular websites with .icu extension. So we didn’t include this data on this analysis.

Top Countries of .ICU Domain Extension

China has the most .icu domain registrations. This number is 10 times greater than the total number of domains registered in all other countries. The United States, Hong Kong, Japan, and Russian are following China with 246, 56, 55, and 45 thousand domain names, respectively.

Most Popular Keywords of .ICU Domains

KEYWORD

DOMAIN COUNT

clicks

23,327

com

15,241

file

11,61

game

11,527

best

10,994

top

10,973

great

91,14

app

8,895

seo

8,713

deal

8,305

The most popular 10 keywords in .icu domain names are click, com, file, game, best, top, great, app, seo and deal. More than 15 thousand .icu domain names are currently registered with each keyword in the list. There is no common word with the top 10 keywords of gTLDs such as .com .net .org. Just one keyword in the list is common with the top 10 keywords of .info extension: best.

.ICU Domain Count by Years and Months

2018 29,065

2019 4,806,226

2020 1,955,166

.icu was opened for registration in 2018. In 2019, .icu was announced many times that it is the fastest-growing new gTLD. Considering the monthly registration data, the chart is as follows;

There are 2 months that the registration number is more than 1 million. January 2020 has more registration than any other month:1.4 million. The second month is November 2019. More than 1,2 million .icu domain names were registered in that month.

.ICU Domain Count by Length

The most registration was made in 6-letter domains, more than 2.5 million. The second most registration length is 5-letter, more than 1.2 million.

Top .ICU Registrars

REGISTRAR

REGISTERED DOMAIN

West263

1,947,921

Webnic

1,036,887

HiChina

969,822

Todaynic

672,341

Alibaba

571,307

West.cn

535,081

Huaimi

242,599

Namecheap

228,905

OwnRegistrar

121,912

Key-Systems

103,905

West263, Hong Kong based registrar, has the most .icu registration with more than 1.9 million registered domain names. Considering the number of domains registered through West263, .icu is the leading extension with 36%. Webnic is the second domain registrar that reached 1 million registration. HiChina, Todaynic, Alibaba, and West.cn are following it with 969, 672, 571, and 535 thousand .icu domain registrations respectively.

.ICU Domain Names for Sale on Marketplaces

There are more than 30 million domain names listed for sale on domain marketplaces. 2,796 of .icu domains listed on various marketplaces such as Sedo, Namecheap.

Internationalized .ICU Domain Names

Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) program, which was started in 2000, allows registrants to register domains with non-Latin alphabet characters.

There are 20 internationalized .icu domains. 17 out of 20 domains are Chinese. The first .icu IDN is touché.icu which was registered on 25 June 2019 and it means “touch” in French.

.ICU Domain Name Disputes

A domain dispute occurs when somebody claims the right to use a domain name.

Where You Can Register a .ICU Domain Name?

The fourth most popular generic extension (gTLD), .icu is a pretty new extension. As of May 2020, it has more than 6.8 million domains. We will see the adventure of the extension which set off 2 years ago in the coming years.

Do you have any .icu domain name? Please share what you think about the .icu extension.

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